For search engine success

“Develop great content” may be the most oft-repeated suggestion in the SEO world. Despite its clichéd status, though, this is sound advice. Appealing, useful content is crucial to search engine optimization. Every search performed at the engines comes with an intent—to find, learn, solve, buy, fix, treat, or understand. Search engines place web pages in their results in order to satisfy that intent in the best possible way. Crafting fulfilling, thorough content that addresses searchers’ needs improved your chance to earn top rankings.

As mentioned, original content goes a long way with Google and your visitors. Copying other people’s content will result in a punishment from Google, which can crush your bottom line.

Want proof?

Remember when you used to find ezine articles in top Google rankings? You don’t see them anymore, and it’s no accident. They were one of the hardest hit by Google’s algorithm update, which aimed to prevent bad content from ranking highly.

Mahalo was a content farm that updated every day with new content, but it wasn’t original content. Google punished them for it, and that resulted in Mahalo needing to pivot their business.

But let’s take this a little further. Original also means originality. Your ideas should be original! Rehashing the same concepts or other posts over and over again is not original. If your content is played out, no one will link to it – and that defeats the purpose of writing content in the first place.

Here’s the train of thought that most website owners have (thinking that gets them in trouble):

“So it says here that we need to create a lot of content…OK…well how can we do this as easily and cheaply as possible?”

“Can we make a bot to scrape content and re-combine it into some form of gibberish that at least the search engines will read?”